HEVC

Changes in how you watch movies, stream TV and use video chat are on the way. These will fundamentally affect the economics of how content is delivered to you, as well as the way that the patents underpinning the enabling technology are licensed.

The article from ROL looks at which patent owners have signed up as licensors to each pool, details how many patents they have on offer and royalty rates which are a combination of publicly available figures and, for Velos, the authors’ own estimates. The analysis pegs the handset royalty rate covered by the main pools at $1.60 which is increased to $2.25 when unaffiliated patent owners (which include Nokia and Microsoft) are included. As the article points out, that represents a royalty of 1.1% for a handset with an average sales price of $200. By way of comparison for 4G LTE technology the cumulative royalty per phone has been estimated to be $7.25.